In small samples and especially in the case of small true default probabilities, standard approaches to credit default probability estimation have certain drawbacks. Most importantly, standard estimators tend to underestimate the true default probability which is of course an undesirable...

Likelihood based inference for multi-state latent factor intensity models is hindered by the fact that exact closed-form expressions for the implied data density are not available. This is a common and well-known problem for most parameter driven dynamic econometric models. This paper reviews,...

We studied the effects of sample size and distribution scale/shape for 3 types of skewness (g1, G1, and b1) and kurtosis (g2, G2, and b2) using 18 simulated probability distributions. In general, skewness and kurtosis always increased with increasing sample size. The order in the skewness...

Sample quantiles are consistent estimators for the true quantile and satisfy central limit theorems (CLTs) if the underlying distribution is continuous. If the distribution is discrete, the situation is much more delicate. In this case, sample quantiles are known to be not even consistent in...

The computing time for Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms can be prohibitively large for datasets with many observations, especially when the data density for each observation is costly to evaluate. We propose a framework where the likelihood function is estimated from a random subset of...

In simple static linear simultaneous equation models the empirical distributions of IV and OLS are examined under alternative sampling schemes and compared with their first-order asymptotic approximations. We demonstrate that the limiting distribution of consistent IV is not affected by...

In nonlinear state-space models, sequential learning about the hidden state can proceed by particle filtering when the density of the observation conditional on the state is available analytically (e.g. Gordon et al. 1993). This condition need not hold in complex environments, such as the...

Many statistical and econometric learning methods rely on Bayesian ideas, often applied or reinterpreted in a frequentist setting. Two leading examples are shrinkage estimators and model averaging estimators, such as weighted-average least squares (WALS). In many instances, the accuracy of these...

We consider Particle Gibbs (PG) as a tool for Bayesian analysis of non-linear non-Gaussian state-space models. PG is a Monte Carlo (MC) approximation of the standard Gibbs procedure which uses sequential MC (SMC) importance sampling inside the Gibbs procedure to update the latent and potentially...

While permutation tests and bootstraps have very wide-ranging application, both share a common potential drawback: as data-intensive resampling methods, both can be runtime prohibitive when applied to large or even medium-sized data samples drawn from large datasets. The data explosion over the...